The domination of Eurovision by Finland's Lordi suggests that metal has finally acquired a bland, pop appeal. The genre's march into the mainstream was also furthered by the recent, critically acclaimed documentary, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. This film sought to massage the roots of the subculture for mass appeal through a cod-sociological study that only managed to reduce everything to the lumpen and drunken. At its margins, though, metal retains its teeth.

To the uninitiated, the ghoulish appearance of Norwegian black metal stalwarts Gorgoroth may mark them out as Nordic cousins to Lordi's Rocky Horror Show pantomime theatrics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The title of Gorgoroth's seventh album appropriates the motto of the Jesuits to establish that they are zealots of a different order.

Satan, to them, is neither godhead nor bogeyman but a state of being: the Nietzschean übermensch. Gorgoroth philosophise with a hammer and sound like a drill-bit to the brain. Theirs is a distillation of a worldview, common to metal at its most fundamental, fixated on embracing all that is monstrous and macabre. It has no need for irony, subtlety or self-conscious displays of intellect, but pursues its goal through the rigorous application of brute force.

Gorgoroth are masters at using the sculptural qualities of sound to forge a music that, while fiercely iconoclastic, sails on majestic flurries of emotion, of which the best example is 'Sign of an Open Eye'.

The eight tracks here clock in at a brief but unremitting 31 minutes. But those of weak wills and weak minds should probably stick to Lordi.